Excitement about the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics extends out into space.
The six NASA astronauts currently living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) held their own mini-Olympics to mark the start of the games, which are being held in Paris and other sites around France.
We get a glimpse at the spaceflyers’ lighthearted efforts in a two-minute video, which NASA released today (July 26).
The action starts with the passing of an Olympic torch — a mock one, of course, as fires are a serious no-no on the ISS — from Jeanette Epps to Mike Barratt to Suni Williams to Tracy Caldwell Dyson, then finally to Butch Wilmore, who’s in the station’s Cupola, with Earth visible in the background.
The astronauts then gear up for their events. Epps and Williams shake out their arms, for example. Wilmore stretches his upper body, then hydrates — by sucking in a water globule floating near his head.
Related: Weightlessness and its effect on astronauts
And then the orbital games begin. Barratt hurls a makeshift discus and Wilmore shotputs a ball of duct tape. Williams and Matthew Dominick (the sixth NASA astronaut living off-Earth at the moment) do some gymnastics, and Epps sprints down an ISS corridor. Caldwell Dyson does some powerlifting, raising a bar that Wilmore and Barratt are clutching off the “ground.”
It’s all very playful, of course. But the astronauts capped things off by sending a sincere message to the athletes of the 23rd Olympiad.
“Over the past few days on the International Space Station, we’ve had an absolute blast pretending to be Olympic athletes,” Dominick says at the end of the video, with the other five NASA astronauts flanking him.
“We, of course, have had the benefits of weightlessness,” he added. “We can’t imagine how hard this must be, to be such a world-class athlete doing your sports under actual gravity. So from all of us aboard the International Space Station to every single athlete in the Olympic Games, godspeed!”
The six NASA astronauts aren’t the only people living on the ISS at the moment; it also houses Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenken and Oleg Kononenko, who commands the orbiting lab’s current Expedition 71 mission.
All of these spaceflyers are serving the typical six-month ISS stint except Williams and Wilmore, who arrived aboard Boeing’s new Starliner capsule on June 6 for a planned weeklong stay. But Starliner’s time in orbit has been extended multiple times as engineers investigate thruster issues and helium leaks with the spacecraft. NASA and Boeing have not yet set a departure date for Starliner.
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